Welcome everyone, got folks joining. This is the June B2B marketing roundtable. We're going to dive deep into Facebook, meta, whatever you want to call it. I'm still in the Facebook camp, but I accept all names.
Jason was calling it a meta book. I like that. I know, that's smart. I'm sure we'll have some more people joining in, but we will get started and kick it off.
Welcome everyone. We're excited to kick off this month's roundtable. We've been getting some really good feedback about the deep dives that we've been doing by channel and platform. We did Google search a couple of months ago, linked in, and today is all about Facebook, meta.
The primary reason we like to leverage this channel in our work with clients is, most of the world is on this platform. Now, granted, they're on this platform to scroll, to look at their friends' photos, not necessarily for vendor research, but the reality is, your B2B audience is on this platform, and it is an opportunity to get in front of your audience and build that brand awareness, that brand recognition, and contribute to building that mental availability. We typically recommend that this be one of the channels as part of your overall mix to really boost your overall brand awareness efforts overall. We find that the platform definitely is a great place to focus on three types of content, when you're really anchoring on using it as more of a broad awareness channel.
We typically recommend things like branded content, social proof, and product value ads. This is really about how do you teach, how do you entertain, how do you show them other folks like them are using this so that they can relate, and how are you getting into some of the specifics of what it actually does, so that, again, that mental availability is really building over time. The goal here is really it's awareness campaigns. It's not about running direct response.
People aren't going to be booking a demo with your sales team on Facebook. That's not really what the goal is. And so it's really focused on that awareness versus conversion objective overall. And our general rule of thumb is not to overthink targeting.
Jason's Yarr are going to dive into a ton of the details as we go in, but overall, frequency wins. You're using it as an opportunity to remind people that you exist, and that's really the overall goal. At the end of the day, when buyers have a problem, they're going to typically think about a brand that they associate with that problem and solving that problem. So that's really the ultimate goal, is how do you leverage this channel to get in front of your audience and to create that brand awareness and effectively create that trigger that you're looking for.
So when they do have the problem, they think of you, and they come to your website or pass through Google to get there. So we have awesome experts today, Evan, Ciara, and Jason. They're going to jump into all of the specifics. I think Ciara will kick it to you next to set the stage for pulling up some of our playbook slides and getting into the weeds on this one.
Well, thanks Megan. Hi everyone, I'm Ciara, if you came to me and hear it refined, I'm just trying to chat about Facebook a little bit, just because it's been around forever. It's one of the longest-standing social platforms. It's still relevant.
We're still talking about it. It has a new name. We call it meta now. And I think there's a lot of really interesting pieces that we're going to chat about today.
And of course, if you have any questions, please feel free to put it in the chat during everything we're chatting about today. So one thing I do want to say about meta, though, is when you go on to meta, just think about yourself as a consumer, you're probably on there for more of a social reason instead of like a work business reason. When you're on LinkedIn, you're there to kind of learn about LinkedIn. So when you get served ads, it's a little more sticky than when you're just maybe on Facebook, scrolling around and you're like, oh, actually, that's interesting.
And so you're seeing more ads in a social setting, which kind of perks your ears up a little bit to paying more attention. For example, I was on Facebook the other day, just scrolling around, I think I was on Marketplace and I got an ad for one of my client's competitors. And I was like, oh, it really stood out to me. And I was like, I got to take a screenshot of this and send it to our client.
And it was just a really interesting platform for me to be served that ad and to actually have that ad come at me from a retargeting standpoint. And I was really interested in it. It really jumped out at me. So I think, what kind of to build on what Megan said, that Facebook is a super important platform to keeping your integrated channel mix, because it's going to allow as much eyeballs to at least the closest to your target market as we can get with our targeting features, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
But it's a really important piece of your channel mix, just to get and increase eyeballs on your ads and then increase that brand awareness. And we'll talk about targeting and we'll talk about some other reporting, but it's going to be a little bit different than LinkedIn. This is going to be really more of that type of funnel, getting cost and efficient clicks and impressions on your ads. So I'm sorry to talk about that today, Jason.
Thanks for trying your screen. We'll kind of dig in and we'll start by talking about some of the targeting pieces. Yeah, I want to jump in real quick just before you kick off with your expert knowledge. But I think the challenge that we hear a lot to or one of the pushbacks we hear is Facebook or meta isn't for B2B.
And I think that we challenge that a little bit while it isn't used for every one of our clients. We do use it for about 50% of our clients because we have found that they're great tools, the leverage remarketing, whether we're using like a brand awareness play or demand capture play. I think that it just really depends on the intent behind it. So when people look at Facebook at large without really thinking of what their goal is and they're just trying to spend money on social and good front of their audience, I think that's where they see some of the misforgens or the performance not there.
So just a reminder that it is valuable. It is a great resource that we use with our clients. And I think that you just have to take an objective lens of what you're truly trying to do with the channel. So I think that this, I'm going to have a lot of questions throughout.
We've got some ahead of time as well that I'll sprinkle in, but let's go ahead and dive in. All right, thank you Evan. And I just want to set the scene really quick. I'm going to manage Jason Thoreau.
I'm one of the performance marketing managers here at Refine. So I'm in the platforms all day every day, kind of evolving our strategies for our clients. And so I just want to set the scene here for what we're going to cover in today's session. So this is actually step three in our paid social guide series.
We went over our paid social fundamentals in the previous session, as well as our paid LinkedIn playbook. So this is step three, which is the paid Facebook play, meta Facebook, meta book, whatever you want to call it. And so just kind of to give you an idea of what we're going to cover today. We're going to go through everything from audience targeting all the way to ongoing optimizations.
And just one thing to keep in mind in case you want to wear Facebook and Instagram are both run out of Meta Business Suite. So those are two platforms that are included in the same ad platform for ease of use across both of those platforms. And just to kind of give you some screenshots of what this platform looks like. We're going to be living in the Meta Business Suite.
So this has evolved a bit over the past few years. Some of these elements used to be separated into their own kind of platforms. Now Meta has kind of rolled everything into what they call the Meta Business Suite, which includes the ads manager, includes the audience manager and the events manager to help you set up your measurements. You'll see on the right there quite a few bells and whistles in terms of analyzing and reporting, engaging the audiences and managing the campaigns.
Well, let's go over audience targeting first because that is a big portion of building out the campaign. And so just to kind of give you a glimpse of how we look at audiences as a whole, we really qualified into three different buckets. We have Amplify, consolidate and optimize. So essentially with Amplify, we want to make sure we're targeting as many people within your ideal customer profile as possible.
We want to make sure to include real-time job titles, functions, industries, those types of things. And in the past kind of going to step two, consolidate. So in the past, I'd say, going back like 10 years ago, it used to be that Facebook really wanted you to hypersegment out your campaigns. And so what we found, you know, five, 10 years ago, is we had sometimes hundreds of campaigns running in a meta ads campaign, just targeting different things for GOs, for different asset types, et cetera.
Well, now it's kind of on the flip side. It's the best practice. Now it's kind of the opposite to consolidate your audiences wherever it's possible. It says, the main reason for that is we've had an emergency of AI and we've had an emergency algorithm just getting smarter at trying to find the people that you're looking to target.
So for those reasons, for reporting and a whole plethora of other reasons, we do recommend we try to consolidate the audience as much as possible. Now there are exceptions to this rule, which I'll get into later in the deck, but just by and large, you know, when in doubt, we always consider to consolidate. And in terms of optimizing, we always recommend to start broad, you know, try to get our total adjustable market in our targeting and in our ICP. And then gradually what we do is we'll try to build exclusions into that as we go.
And what we have more info on this in the paid social fundamentals in terms of defining what your ICP is. So I encourage you all to check that out if you haven't already. Let's say about audience size because that's something we get a lot of questions about too. So ideally, we want to make sure our audience isn't too small or too large.
So really we've found this week's about to be somewhere between 10,000 to a million people really depending on what the product or services and just to kind of give you some recommendations of what can happen if it's too restrictive. A lot of this times we can see add fatigue because we're targeting people to higher frequency because there's not as many and that can result in not as many people clicking on your ads. It can result in low reach given not only a small percentage of the total audience is actually being served in ad and it actually can be more expensive if we have too restrictive of an audience. And so, you know, I want to make sure that the budget also correlates to the audience size.
Larger audiences do require more budget than a smaller audience to really penetrate that audience and get in front of a good chunk of that audience. And this is really where the consolidation comes in mind too. With the consolidation of the audience as it really allows you to focus on reach and scale, which is really important for the algorithm in terms of optimizing the campaigns. And let's talk about kind of the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn.
As I mentioned before, Facebook isn't strictly a B2B platform that is more LinkedIn, but that's not to say that our audience does not also live on Facebook. I mean, usually if someone is active on LinkedIn, they're going to be active on at least one other social platform most of the time. So I mean, between Facebook and Instagram, most people are at least active on one of those still two today's standards. So I would say two of the things to keep in mind as we talk about Facebook first LinkedIn is there's limited native targeting capabilities for B2B specifically.
And so that's why I kind of going to point to with Facebook, it's much more important to be reliant on those third party tools that can bring that B2B data into our audiences. So things like Zoom info or metadata or some sort of third party tool that brings more users into our audiences from those tools. We'll kind of get into more of that later on. But for those reasons, we do recommend, as we mentioned before, that we're primarily leveraging retargeting and awareness campaigns.
Kind of gone away from the bottom of the funnel conversion campaigns as it relates to Facebook. I could go into why that is, but by and large, you know, it's saying just for our purposes, for B2B, you know, we're typically using that for retargeting and for awareness. Yeah. And listen, oh, sorry, I'm going to go ahead.
I'm just going to say just to know here is most of our clients that are on meta are using retargeting campaigns, like Jason said, first and foremost. There are a few instances where we recommend native audiences, which Jason will talk about, too. But we really want to make sure that if you're using that, that you at least use retargeting and then there are different ways to make sure you're optimizing for the appropriate use of the native targeting feature in meta. But retargeting is definitely going to be a huge strategy for you to deploy on this channel.
Yeah. I'd say also, LinkedIn is way more expensive than Facebook. So I mean, if most of the times a lot of our clients are looking for a secondary tertiary channel to really have a cheap traffic driver, Facebook is still really good at that. And in comparison to LinkedIn, much cheaper to advertise by and large.
Yeah. I think it's a good channel to really test creative as well. I think of it that way, but it's almost like a creative testing playground before you push it to other channels is the massive audience. As we mentioned, we, you know, recommendation is to start broad.
And I think we'll jump next to like native audiences and negative targeting kind of how that works. But, you know, think of the advantages of just a small budget to experiment to validate or force correct any sort of messaging before you push it to maybe some of those other channels that are generally, generally more expensive. That's the point of, and then I would say one thing I still do not like about LinkedIn is you can't do multiple asset types in the same campaign, whereas with Facebook, you can. So with LinkedIn, you have to have all static images or all document ads or all videos with Facebook, we can test one to one against a static or a video ad or a carousel or things like that.
So correct there. It's definitely a playground for creative testing, if you will. Let's get into the retargeting piece. So as we kind of mentioned, retargeting kind of bread butter on Facebook, there are a lot of different ways you can retarget on Facebook.
So one of those ways would be through website visitors through people landing on specific landing pages on your site, like a demo page, a pricing page, a sale, talk to sales rep call action, you can also target by contact lists or, you know, pull this from your CRM or other third party automated tools. You can also target by posts or ad engagement. So all of this to say, you know, there is a section in the Facebook ads manager where you can actually go in and create these custom audiences. And so we'll have kind of screenshots of this throughout kind of showing where those things live.
But you know, we have the custom audiences, we have a lookalike audiences, and you can also save audiences, which we'll get into how to actually build those audiences in a couple of different ways as well. Quickly over the third party audiences, you know, we can target, as I kind of mentioned, company targeting through a list, the CRM lists and such like that, but I'll kind of go to the data section, just kind of want to briefly talk about the match rates too. Usually when we upload a list into Facebook, you're not going to get a one to one match with every single user. So I kind of recommend there if we're uploading a list, start broad as big of a list as you can.
And Facebook will kind of dwindle those numbers down and match it to how many people they can actually attach Facebook accounts to. Let's sort of the native audience portion here. So we do have limited audience targeting in terms of B2B audiences. Now we've seen success in targeting B2B audiences with these, but we just got to be selective with how we do it.
So that's what we always recommend, start with retargeting first and thereafter, try to get those third party match audiences. But you know, even if we're talking about outside of B2B, some cases where this targeting can be effective as things like retail, hospitality, service trades or professional services, think like landscapers, construction managers, electricians, anywhere we need to drive leads to can be effective in terms of native targeting. But let me kind of get into more granularly how to do that and just how to build an audience. So there's a couple ways to do it.
One, you can build a save audience in the audience tab of the ads manager. So kind of go to the screen, you would build the audience independently of making the campaign and we can also build it while we're building a campaign, I'll kind of get into the difference between both those methods. Neither one is wrong. It's just a matter of preference in terms of if you like to build the audience before or build the audience while you're actually building the rest of the campaign.
I personally like to build the audience in the saved way and then attach that audience to the campaign that I'm building. But again, there's no wrong way to do it. It's just kind of a different UX and a different way to look at it. But this is what I mean in terms of the differences between building a campaign and a save audience way and building it within the campaign.
So this is the way that you would do in terms of actually building it within the campaign. So you would select your campaign objective, select the page and Instagram account that you're using, set your schedule and then you press edit audiences, start actually layering your ICP criteria. So things like job titles, job functions, industries, etc. So like I said, either way works.
It's just a matter of preference in terms of if you like to build the audiences out beforehand and then attach them in here as the audience for the campaign. I want to talk about this. So Advantage Plus is kind of like a new AI way of leveraging and targeting beyond your ICP criteria. So this is actually similar to LinkedIn's audience expansion tool or Google search partners.
By large, typically we recommend turning this off. We typically don't want to target outside of our ICP and just kind of going to our general philosophy as an agency, we have pretty restrictive targeting in general just to make sure that we're hitting people that are high and sense and actually wanting to buy your product or service. So in terms of this, I think there's more benefit in this from a B2C perspective, not as much from a B2B perspective. So by large, just recommend turning this off and making sure that the targeting stays restricted within our ICP targeting.
Yeah, Jason. Also, just put a plug in here to Advantage Plus. We've tested this too with clients. We've done campaigns that have had Advantage Plus on and have not had Advantage Plus on and Advantage Plus is a great job of driving increased reach, more impressions, lower CPC, lower CPC, or CPMs.
But when you look at those, that audience in Google Analytics and you see kind of the bounce rate, the time on site, it's much lower than just a normal with AltaVinish Plus. So there's kind of a little bit of a plug there around. It's going to give you more cost efficiency in the platform, but not necessarily that quality or increased quality of traffic that maybe you're holding for. Exactly.
And we can touch on this a little bit in terms of audience size. One thing just to note out off of this slide is our minimum audience is actually 1,000. So if our audience is actually too small in relation to our budget, Facebook will actually alert us of that, which is quite nice of them to do. But just want to make sure that, again, going back, we want to make sure our budget matches our audience size.
So you can adjust the budget, the campaign schedule, the frequency, and just to make sure that the audience size in relation to the budget is right for the campaign. And so like many pretty much all other platforms, you can target by location. A few kind of caveats here. You can target people living in this location, only target people are physically in this location, but you can also target by people living in or recently in this location.
So if someone's like traveled, they're probably more unlikely to actually be right speed. There's traveling to that area. But just kind of wonder what that is, something I see a lot of times an audience people might target both of these things and not just one or target people only recently in this location. So just one setting that I want to make sure people are keeping in mind of, again, like this typically we like to keep the geo targeting.
Well within the campaign, I've seen this as though where we do break out by geo. That's typically for larger accounts that really don't, they want to make sure that a certain geo gets a certain percentage of spends. Typically a lot of the times US will get a majority of the spend just given that most of people's ICPs in relation to who they're targeting live in the US. Obviously if there are European company that can differ, but just kind of one note there that depending on what locations and what geo targeting you use, you could find that places with higher population are kind of been overshadowed places with lower population.
And I think also too, keeping in mind job titles. So similar to LinkedIn, we can target with job titles. I would say it's definitely not as robust as LinkedIn's ability to target job titles, but you know, going to browse demographics, work, job titles, there is still a good amount of job titles that you can target natively with Facebook's advertising platform. So sending keep in mind there, again, not as robust as LinkedIn and we can't segment that with a third party tool, but just keep in mind this is still a lever we can pull with LinkedIn.
Yeah, and Jason, I think too, I've been just put this question I came in before was what signals we're using to segment B2B audiences without, you know, that accurate job targeting. I think my job title on my Facebook account is like my job title from 20 years ago. So I'm curious your thoughts on, you know, what other levers we could pull. Yeah.
Well, one right here, industry is also another one we can pull. We can also target job functions. So if someone's working in accounting or finance or construction, that's something we can also target. It's a little less reliable because a lot of people don't update their Facebook profiles as much.
I'm guilty of that as well. So it kind of another reason why we always recommend to augment those third party tools over this native targeting because that's going to usually be more accurate data or if it's your CRM, for instance, usually those contexts in your CRM are going to be a lot more fresh because they fill out a form or something like that on the actual website. So it's a lot more relevant and recent information. So when in doubt, I would say like need to at least have a CRM connected to really make sure that Facebook is on.
Well, that note, yeah, like I just mentioned industries, another lever we can pull just kind of going into the same targeting area. You go to browse, demographics, work industries and you can search for any relevance industries within your ICT. But one of the things we've been talking about, we've been talking about the inclusions. Let's talk about the exclusions because that's equally, if not more important a lot of the times and kind of going the opposite way with the same targeting, you can target job titles that aren't relevant.
You can target industries that aren't relevant. You can target ages that might not be relevant. You can target specific company names. You can target a company list of existing customers.
And so typically like with an awareness campaign, we would want to make sure that we're excluding anyone that's already a customer. Because obviously those people are already customers. We want to make sure we're only using those awareness campaigns to hit users that are not customers yet. And then vice versa, you want to make sure that your retargeting campaigns are restrictive in terms of excluding any relevant outside of our ICP.
Even though they visited the website and were retargeting based on website visits, that doesn't necessarily mean they're part of our ICP. They're just maybe visiting the website because they saw it in a Google search or whatever it may be. So how do you recommend people audit for exclusions? I mean, I would say it's definitely an ongoing thing.
I mean, probably monthly. I mean, you do need time for these audiences to fill up. So especially with the exglue, like with the retargeting audience, the longer that audience runs, the more people are going to have built up into that audience. So I probably say monthly is a good time frame.
Yeah. Moving on here, let's talk about our account structure segmentation. So this is a question we get a lot. How do we actually build out each campaign within the accounts?
And I would say by and large, typically we're not actually breaking out the campaigns by audience. We're more so breaking them out by content. And so making kind of mention this at the beginning, there's three different asset types that we typically will segment by. And I'll get into that in one of the next slides.
But ultimately, we want to make sure that our placements, our content type are in single ad sets. And one kind of note of this, this will cause some of the audiences to actually overlap. And that's okay because a lot of the time, the reason that we're serving different things to the same audience is because there's this unique message and unique ad creative. So the last thing we want to do is create two campaigns with the same exact audience, the same exact ad creative and the same exact ad copy.
But it's totally okay if we have the same audience and we're serving a different ad creative with different messaging to that same audience. And again, kind of going back to consolidation though, want to make sure we consolidate as much as possible to reduce that overlap. And so this is what kind of making mention at the beginning, there's really three different content types of buckets that we kind of put these campaigns into. So we'll be probably value ads.
These are ads kind of touting our product or solution in some way that goes to an intent page on your website. So it might be a product specific page or a service specific page that gives the user more information on the value that that product brings to the end user. There's also more awareness and education content. I'd say Facebook is really good at using this type of content in terms of an awareness and education place.
Usually like in an awareness perspective, we want to educate those customers on what different nameshates us from the competitors or we want to take them to some sort of third party article or a blog piece, something where they can read something more long form and actually learn more about the brand or something related to the brand or listical or an article or something like that. And last but not least, we want to make sure we have that social proof as well. We want to make sure we're highlighting case studies, ROI included industry recognitions, those types of things. So that social proof is really important.
Obviously people want to buy something that they know works and that other people within the ICP have already seen to work. So we do have more information on how this fits in how these buckets fit and how to actually go out this content or creative structure and strategy. Link is at the bottom there. So definitely encourage you to check it out.
I want to add a little layer here as we think about, I think it was social media today, Andrew Hutchinson wrote a kind of a little article on how Facebook is being transparent about their content and how they're pushing it to viewers and users. So a lot of people traditionally have used Facebook as a cheap means to get clicks to their website or drive some sort of blog review or lead gen motion. And they ran a little test and feed views consumed with links was 2% of total and 98% of feed was favored by non-link content. So I think it's just a reminder that there's this evolution to form like how you leverage the channel to use a zero click mindset and providing value within your ad or within your content that isn't collected right people off Facebook.
So they're the first platform that I know that's transparently said this out loud. So it's just something to keep in mind, your marketing, your objectives, make sure that you have truly the right intent behind it and you're not just using it early play. Excellent point. And so this is just kind of more visual representation of what I was talking about.
So typically you'll have that product ads group, you'll have that contents or that brands kind of education piece and then you'll have the marketing campaign. You'll notice the marketing campaigns, we have one for all site visitors and then high intent visitors. So if someone just went to the home page, that might not be the same intent as someone going to the demo page or the product page. So it's important that we kind of split those out and you'll kind of see multiple ads within all of those.
And I think this is a mission on one of the next slides, but we want to make sure we have at least three ads in each of the campaigns. If we have just one running, that's not really enough inputs to tell Facebook what works and what doesn't work. So it's really important that we develop a baseline by putting a few different ads in that campaign so that the algorithm kind of picks and chooses what to serve more based on how people are engaging with each of those ads. And I think one of these next ones will get more into that.
But let's talk about the ad placements as well. So if you've been in Facebook ad manager in the ad group section, there is a lot of different ad placements. So we actually don't recommend using at least half of them simply because a lot of them are kind of lower quality placements or just lower quality placements. But essentially the main ones, main things you can mind there in terms of the creative, we typically only use the one to one square ratio assets for images and video clips that really maximize the visibility in the compared to like a traditional landscape format and kind of going back to the zero, zero click content philosophy, you know, having that type of content on a certain objective which will get into the campaign objectives here in a minute.
But you know, that in feed consumption is important and really going to help us drive more direct traffic to the side and kind of get into the signals of, you know, how we think it's actually working and what to look for if it's actually working. But main main placement types to be the regular Facebook feed, Instagram feed, Facebook stories, Instagram stories, those kind of vertical placements. We also have the few video placements as well. But really outside of that, that's all we recommend in terms of placements just to maximize and raise the quality of each of those impressions in each of those clicks.
I've kind of mentioned this before. These are the ones we avoid. These are just the ones that we find have lower quality impressions and traffic. So in the audience placements, part of the build, you'll see checkboxes who check or uncheck these.
And so a lot of these like the apps and sites, there's like other things outside of Facebook where the ads could potentially show up or Facebook search results or that Facebook right column as well. We find to not be as high of impressions. There's also the audience network and the messenger app. But again, like unfortunately, we don't find that a lot of those placements offer a lot to be desired in terms of quality impressions and traffic.
So by large, we just recommend removing all of these ones listed here. Well, let's talk about the campaign objectives because that is a question we get a lot to you in terms of which campaign objectives to use and when. And so typically we're just using awareness traffic and engagement. It's been a while since I've used a strict conversion campaign to drive actual conversions.
Again, kind of going back to our philosophy, we typically only use it for retargeting and awareness. Sometimes we'll use engagement, but typically one in two are the one that are going to be used the most. And kind of outside of that, one thing to keep in mind is that we do have different types of buying types. So one is auction and one is reservation.
So auction is the most used one. That's basically where your ads are competing in auction against your competitors to get that impression. This is going to cause more fluctuations in CPMs and stuff like that. But that is what's ultimately going to get us the most quality impressions.
The reservation buying type, essentially, it's a bit of a weird one. You're basically buying the impressions ahead of time at a fixed cost per million impressions. So this has very niche cases, but we're pretty much 99% of our clients were going to be using the auction type. I'd say probably the reservation type more reserved for something like e-commerce or something in the BDC space.
Yeah, and then just applied here to Jason. We've had we use the lead objective just as a test. It's obviously not something that we recommend, but some of our clients just want to test it to see how what types of leads come in. One thing that I've seen with a recent client was that we were running the lead objective and we got over 100 leads within a month, which is pretty decent for them.
Zero percent of them turned into their definition of MQL. And so it's not effective use of your spend. It's definitely a good test if you want to spend somebody in a test to see who comes in and what types of folks you're targeting on LinkedIn or sorry, Facebook, but it really isn't effective use of your spend to be running the lead gen objective. So just, you know, we have tested it and just hasn't converted to that quality that we typically would want to see.
Yeah, I would say if your goal is to get leads and you just want a volume of leads and you don't care what happens after that, totally run the lead objective. But most people they want quality leads that are actually going to turn in pipeline revenue. So for those reasons, we typically reserve that for the native, I'd rather do a traffic objective running to a forum on the website and get leads that way through that that goes in the year CRM at that point. Then you can retarget them in other ways, sign up for email, nurtures, flows and, you know, the whole nine years there.
But say this is the most one we use for Facebook is awareness. So this is just the one that is used mainly for cold audiences and designed for that in-feed consumption, not necessarily get people to click, just to get people to view it on their feed. So this is the cheapest objective in terms of efficiency. If you just want to get your brand name out there, just gets some sort of message resonating with your ICP.
This is going to be the best case for you. This is the best cost to user value. So, you know, most reach most awareness. This is going to be what you're going to use to get your brand name out there the most.
Then we got on the flip side, we have traffic. So definitely use traffic for the retargeting campaigns more likely than not. This is typically for those warmer audiences, still going to drive multiple pages on the website. What we find with the traffic objective is you're going to get more actual clicks to the website, you're going to get higher engagements.
This is really ideal for that brand's pillar of content types where we're driving to blogs, case studies or just general information where someone wants to be educated more so they go to the site to learn more about it. And we'll talk about engagement too. We use this sometimes. I would say not nearly as much as the other two objectives.
But I would say if you have a smaller budget, for instance, this can be encouraging, you know, I wouldn't say this is a better case than the sales or the leads. So ultimately you're going to get people to engage with the post or hopefully get an engagement or two or a conversion or two. But ultimately, this is probably used the least out of them all. I'd say 80% of the time you're probably going to use one of the first two objectives.
And this is good for, I mean, if you wanted to run the messenger app, add placement at the test, this could be a good call for that. I would say, like out of all of the ones that we don't recommend targeting in terms of the other placement, I'd say messenger is the most intriguing one just because it lives in a different app and you're getting in peoples inboxes quote unquote. Problem is a lot of people don't use the Facebook messenger app anymore. So I'd say just your impressions aren't going to be as high there because it is a separate app and it is a separate place where people need to go to see the app.
Jason, before we move to conversions, I want to highlight a question that Carrie had in the chat. Thanks, Carrie so much for asking it. She's running organic meta strategy and kind of similar to what Evan, the article Evan posted about what he just mentioned around not publishing links in your post or in your ad. And her question is around like, would you recommend essentially she's asking if we should have the link be in the first comment?
This is from our G. Yeah, definitely a way around that. You don't want it in the actual posts, but in LinkedIn, I see this all the time to put it in the comment section that can even encourage more engagement in the comment section when you do something like that. So totally sounds right there.
As long as I'm the post itself and we reserve it to the comment section that that's totally fine. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. And then it is going to serve your ad more if the link is not in the post like that article Evan just posted in here. So of course, you know, you want to like game the system a little bit to try to get the impressions on the ads, but still allow for your link to be in the first comment as a workaround.
Great question. You only need to keep in mind, like if your post gets shared, the link obviously in the comment doesn't necessarily go with that. So just keeping an eye on the feed and the thread and if for whatever reason, people within your organization do share that post like going in and having whether your social manager, your self-care, commenting that link on that new thread just to make sure that there's organic reach more broadly. Yeah, 30%.
All right, let's get into tracking in conversions. So definitely a lot of questions about this all the time. It's what good is an advertising campaign to be captured. So you know, we definitely want to make sure anytime we want to Facebook campaign, we're using any measurement capabilities that we have.
One of the most common is to use UTM parameters. So I'm sure everyone's got a link before and they've seen a very long string of a URL at the end of the link when they actually click it. So those are called UTM parameters. It really is a way to pass information from advertising links to your analytics software.
So because you have a lot more details on how they got to your site and how they performed. A lot of the times though, I see these set up incorrectly a lot. And really simplistic things like capitalizing Facebook versus not capitalizing it can throw it off because you'll have two different buckets of UTM's kind of spread out in terms of your reporting. So we actually do have a UTM playbook about this.
So if you're not too familiar with UTM's and how to set that up, I would definitely recommend going to our accession based UTM playbook as free resource in the vaults and kind of give you a step by step got in how to do that. I would say by large, we want to make sure at least we have source, which in this case is Facebook and the medium, which is usually PPC or paid a lot of the time they see that as well. Just to kind of decipher between the organic side of Facebook and the paid side of Facebook in terms of reporting or whatever else you're trying to do. Let's talk about conversion tracking.
This has kind of changed a lot over the past few years. We had iOS 14 came out, which kind of removed a lot of tracking capabilities on iPhones. And so a lot of the times now a lot of the conversions are set up on the back end of the site, on the server side as opposed to the front end of the site. So by large though, our philosophy here, we want to make sure that we have declared intent actions.
So for B2B SAS or just B2B in general, maybe things like demo requests, contact forms, free trial signups, a lot of the times we don't want to just use the out of the box conversion actions. Some of those are still valuable because they give us some more data on how that person converted or where people are dropping off on the site and the conversion funnel. So it is important to keep track of a few different conversion actions. But we want to make sure that we at least have those declared intent actions for demo requests, especially contact forms, et cetera.
So we'll kind of get into that. But usually when a client comes to us, it usually involves us overhauling their conversion tracking in one way, shape, or form to align with this philosophy. And we'll kind of get into the hybrid conversion piece in a few slides. But just something to keep in mind.
We want to make sure that conversion tracking is something that is not looked over. And so let's talk about how we do reporting and how we measure that success. So we do actually do have a very good document on this. It's called our Pay Media KPI Tracker and Spreadsheet Template.
This is also available in the vault for anyone to download. But essentially, there's a lot of good stuff that is within the spreadsheet. There's actually instructions on how to use this as well in the first time of the spreadsheet. So I encourage everyone to check this out and use it as you see fits.
But it's going to have things like funnel metrics. We're going to have our odd customer acquisition costs. We're going to have our high-end 10 revenue opportunities. We're going to show pipeline numbers.
We're going to have platform totals for channel metrics, specific metrics for LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, also budget pacing, another important thing. Obviously, no one, at least I know, has an unlimited budget. So we want to make sure that we are keeping track of our actual versus our projected spend by channel and making daily budget adjustments as we see fit to make sure that we're coming in on target. Usually, Facebook is pretty good at spending the budget that you've set forth to it.
Typically, you can target by lifetime or daily budget. I don't think we actually talked about in this deck, but more times than not, we're usually using a daily budget versus a lifetime budget because it's a slumber control of the spend over a period of time. Let's talk about just our tracking cadence and just our reporting cadence. You can't fix what you don't measure.
We want to make sure that we are measuring and reporting on different things weekly, monthly, and quarterly. So weekly, we definitely want to make sure we're looking at budget pacing and our ad frequency. If we're seeing that we have a very high ad frequency, that can mean our audience is too small and we might need to make adjustments there. There are areas where you can actually adjust the ad frequency, which I don't know if we have a screenshot in there, but definitely an important piece to making sure that the budget and the ads are shown to the users as effectively as possible.
Other thing to keep in mind, obviously, users can comment on Facebook posts. We want to make sure if there is any comments on the posts we see people with specific job titles engaging, overall, we want to look at the sentiment that people are having as they engage with our ad content. Hopefully, we have someone actually moderating that. You have seen times where there's a lot of comments that have gone unchecked and might be someone with a customer issue that's like, where's my product?
This product isn't working. So we want to make sure we are running ads that there is someone actually moderating the comments as well. That's very important. There are a lot of trolls out there.
You don't want to protect your brand a bit. I'd say it's even worse, but that's a story for another time. Yeah. Monthly, we definitely want to look at more in-platform metrics, like impressions reach, click-through rate, cost per click.
We want to look at our performance relative to our historical benchmarks. We do have some SaaS paid social benchmarks, which I'll get into in the next slide. But all of that, if we're not keeping track of this, if we are keeping track of this monthly and weekly, it's going to make it a lot easier to support on the quarterly metrics as well. Because usually with the quarterly metrics, we're looking at the full funnel reports of our platform and CRM metrics.
We're looking at conversions. We're looking at closed one and closed loss customers. And so ideally, we're looking at different things over longer or shorter periods of time. And really, the full funnel gives us a better understanding of that longer form performance and how the overall demand creation and demand capture strategies are actually working.
So it really helps us avoid making sweeping changes in a single month and really helps us monitor those macro trends a bit better. And let's talk about some things to watch for as these campaigns get up and running. And as they start spending over a longer period of time. And so we have to know if it's working or not, that's a big portion of it.
And so some key things here that we want to look for and given that a lot of our campaigns are on an awareness or retargeting objective, what we're usually not looking at is conversions because we're running higher in the funnel. The goal isn't really to get them to convert on Facebook, it's to get them to convert elsewhere. And so some things we want to look at is like the direct and organic traffic increases. If our Facebook company page visits increases, if our company page followers increase, look at engagement from our ICP, are they commenting?
Are they reacting? Are they engaged job titles in our ICP actually commenting on the posts? You know, look at assisted declared intent conversions and something we'll get into a little more here shortly is itself the reported attribution piece, as mentioned, let's just face a Facebook right there, but essentially we'll kind of get into the self-reported attribution and kind of getting that feedback back from our end users is important for kind of closing that feedback loop. So I'll kind of get in there.
And feel free to check out the SaaS page, social benchmarks page to kind of get an idea for what KPIs will look for, where they should be at for each stage of the campaign. Let's talk about hybrid attribution. So this is something that we do for all of our clients. It's a mixture of looking at our self-reported attribution.
So essentially what that means is usually on a contact form on a website, we have a field that says, how did you hear about us? And it's usually an open form field where people can put an I-hert you from Facebook, I heard you from LinkedIn, word of mouth, I saw you in an event, whatever they want to put in there. We typically don't want to restrict it. We want it to be an open-ended field so they can put anything in there.
Unfortunately, sometimes you might get people that say, like, I saw you on the internet or I saw you on Google, which doesn't give us a full sense of where that person came from, but we can bind it with that actual software-based attribution. It allows us to really bring everything together and create a hybrid attribution framework. And so plug for another item we have is the hybrid attribution framework sheets that we have included in here. So essentially, if we have all the infrastructure set up correctly and we have that self attribution set up, it's going to give us more visibility in how people are converting, where they're converting, and ultimately how much closed one revenue is coming from Facebook or other platforms.
So again, encourage you to look at the new and hardy framework sheet and the hybrid attribution framework where we have step-by-step guide of all this. This is awesome. And you'll see this one says LinkedIn. We just pulled this in for this conversation because we haven't got our fully completed, but yeah, it's just a good way and a reminder is everything that you execute, you for Facebook, meta, LinkedIn, how you map it to what motion is the most important.
So is it a brand motion? Is it a demand motion? Is it an expand motion? And then you align those metrics that Jason talked about in the last slide to really identify our recent success or not.
So I think when you lump it all together, it just becomes challenging. So Jason, I think we might wrap it there. Open it up for a few questions here. Awesome job.
Thank you. Thank you so much. You're the expert in this. I love it.
It's like I'm not in the chat. And to kick that off, I just want to ask this one direct question. And in your honest opinion, Sarah, Jason, like is meta worth it? Like is it a channel?
I'm going to be to be that it's worth my time and energy. What are your opinions? No wrong answers. Uh, Sarah, first of all, first of all, you.
You can go Jason. I'll pass all of you. I will say this. I will say typically it's not the first channel that we're recommending to our customers in terms of a demand creation standpoint.
In terms of B2B, LinkedIn is in its golden years. I would say Facebook is kind of beyond its golden years. but that's not to say there's still a massive user base on Facebook. I would just say that typically we're looking at Facebook as a secondary or tertiary channel.
So there's still a lot of value in it. Not really good for a bottom funnel conversion piece, but definitely great for cheap traffic and kind of getting in front of a lot of people. So yeah, I would say definitely still worth it. Depending on your goals, depending on what you're trying to do, it's definitely still worthwhile as a channel.
Yeah, I agree with that. Evan and Jason and Donna too in the chat. It's about the integrated channel strategy. Facebook is one piece of that.
You don't have to spend a lot of money on Facebook. It's a cheaper channel, but it's about using it as a complement to the other channels in your marketing mix. So using Facebook as a massive channel to reach rivals, LinkedIn has something that's a little bit more targeted. Maybe a Reddit, maybe display as something that's going to help aid in that create brand strategy.
So what typical budget do you see as a percentage of total? Like if individuals are coming here and they're like, how much budget do I need to put into this channel to really, I know it varies by audience size, but what's kind of our standard go to? I'd say it's probably like 15-25% nowadays at the given time. Still a pretty good size I would say.
So if you're like demand creation budget or you're total paid media budget, would you? Oh yeah, I would say probably total demand creation standpoint. It could sometimes get like a third or sometimes half. I've seen a good half, but again, depends on what your goals are.
So your point before Evan is a great channel to test creative on in a cheaper basis. So definitely kind of use it as a creative playground, if you will, and then whatever kind of reforms there, you can kind of mimic that on other channels. Okay. What's being creative too?
This is always the question that follows up. Like what the hell do I do for creative? Like what are the, how many ads we talked a little bit about that? So we don't need to go into that.
But like what have you guys seen actually working directly with clients that have been some of those like favorable creatives that have driven those eyeballs or kind of shown some interest? I say Carousel ads are a great way to kind of, and we do this on our own LinkedIn page as well, but I'd say Carousel is a great way because you're kind of flipping through a few images. You can really have some unique callouts on each of those individual images and you can have, I think, up to almost 10. So you can really kind of tell a story in it.
And I think like, especially for that awareness piece, that's really what you want to do is kind of tell that story or educate people about your brand born in a fun kind of visual way. Yeah, I would say an author that too. We're really fun video videos, a huge on meta just because you're scrolling around and you see video all the time. So having like control, stopping, compelling video piece to your content strategy is going to be a really good spot to test on that.
Sort of. I'm just having all of these questions. Sorry. But are there anything, is there one area that people like that you see when we audit somebody that's advertising on Facebook or meta now, like the biggest area for improvement or a quick win for anybody here that can go and check their accounts on?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's always the consolidation piece. I think a lot of people, they might be in like the 10 year mentality where they think they need to hyper, hyper segment out campaigns. So more likely than not, like first thing I say is consolidate these 20 campaigns into four or five. That's definitely one of those comments I'd say a lot of the times to the conversion tracking piece is usually something left to be desired there.
I think also too, a lot of you ever have just haven't done is implement the conversion API, which is called copy for short. And so kind of in this new kind of privacy centric marketing era, it's important to kind of connect, essentially connects all of your conversion on the back end of the website where users can't remove their cookies or things like that. And you know, target those people more one to one through kind of more advanced targeting ways kind of takes in the developer to set up usually a lot of the time, but it is worthwhile and kind of getting more data points back from the platform and really being able to optimize the campaigns because you have so many more data points that are feeding back to the campaigns. Yeah, Jason's right.
I think campaign consolidation is a big thing. Just campaign structure is huge for kind of increasing some of those efficiencies across the platform. Another thing I would also say is just the audience like using native Facebook audiences is there's a lot to you can do a lot of things and they can be really big or really small. And so really trying to get as tight as possible with the usage of the platform and then making sure the exclusions are updated and some of those lists are updated.
But really it's really what we see that we're finding that we're updating for our clients. Perfect. Perfect close. Thank you, Paul.
And thank you to everyone that joined really appreciate it. These conversations we love them each month and keep the questions coming to if anything after this pops up. Let us know just not suggest like find us on LinkedIn or our marketing at Refine Labs.com. But yeah, we'll be around next month as well.
You can see our events page to register for those in advance. But Jason, Ciara, Steph, team, thank you for joining and good to see everyone. Thanks a lot.